It is baseless to understand
management without the word crisis. Crises are everywhere and the part of
individuals, societies or countries and most of the activities and efforts in
the world are being performed to tackle crisis and eliminate its threat. These
efforts could be named as Management. Crises penetrate easily in those areas
where there is no management and crises ruin everything due to lack of
appropriate measures. So the importance of crisis management arises in the
present age which is more vulnerable to crises. Crisis management is a
systematic approach that encompasses prevention of, and preparation for, a
critical incident or crisis event. (Jeffrey Mitchells, 2003)
A great deal of research has been added to the knowledge of crisis management.
First of all, planning is considered to be an integral part of today's crisis
management. This planning could be in shape of policies, procedures and
different strategies that counter crises. Basically there are different stages
in crisis. First is pre-crisis stage where crisis exist as a threat to future
conditions. Second the crisis stage, where the actual crisis occurs and the post
crisis stage which prevails after crisis. The level of uncertainty varies among
these stages and the organizations or countries make their policies accordingly.
Furthermore, it is evident that modern management involves policies made by the
board of directors for management to implement. Actually the modern style of
management tries to minimize crises by splitting decision making in two phases
keeping in view past corporate collapses like Enron, JP Morgan and so on, which
occurred due to lack of viable crisis management. Moreover, crisis and risk
management go hand in hand. Risk analysis helps to find out unpredictable events
in the future and their probability of happening. Crisis management deals with
strategies that help to cope with uncertain events.
Likewise, economic, energy, educational and political crises exist in Pakistan.
But these had not been dealt with competent crisis management techniques. In
presence of these crisis management strategies and techniques why countries like
Pakistan is still not being able to overcome its crises prevailing over the
decades. While many countries in the world had won the war against crises but on
other side, Pakistan is still not being able to think beyond its troubles.
Since independence Pakistan could not come out of crisis as the magnitude became
larger with the passage of time. These problems are linked not only with the
fate of our country but millions of people in Pakistan have been greatly
affected. As a citizen we try to find out the solution of them and think about
crises in some part of our daily life. But the important question which needs to
be answered first is that why could we not able to resolve them. If crises are
not being seen in the long term view, then it may not be possible to find future
effects and devise a capable plan that could eliminate potential crises. The
same case happened with Pakistan where absence of long term planning had led
crises being worst. Different strategies and tactics had been taken at different
intervals that did not give required results because those action plans did not
even try to eradicate the root causes of prevailed crisis in the country. Now
what could be done to lead Pakistan out of them. First, there is a need to
ensure political stability, in our country. If political environment is stable,
governments are likely to perform long term planning to manage crisis in an
effective and efficient manner. In addition, there is need of political will to
focus on crises and find out their real causes. Crisis management methodologies
would pay more in this case, and they are bright chances that Pakistan may
transform into a prosperous nation.
In case of Pakistan, crisis management is not being done in a way that it should
be. We need to differentiate crisis management approaches between developed and
underdeveloped countries. By this way, we will be better able to understand
Pakistan's case. South Korea has proved its name as a developed country. This
had happened due to result oriented crisis management approaches. Government and
corporate entities in different sectors develop effective policies and
strategies to deal with crisis. On the other hand, Koreans formulated a
mechanism to measure performance of their policies or strategies. Crisis
management scorecard, crisis management indexes or other tools were being used
to prepare for future crisis. While in Pakistan, crisis management does not
reflect these things. Policies are formed but not back up with plan to measure
policy effectiveness. For instance, if any policy could not handle the crisis,
it should be reviewed but unfortunately the case is not with Pakistan. Whereas
crisis management should be based on a principle of "Continuous Improvement" as
in South Korea where plans, strategies and work are continuously improved and
reviewed. This approach made them less vulnerable to crisis. In Pakistan where
uncertainty avoidance is high, especially government and public sector
institutions are less likely to adopt a proactive approach in managing crisis.
As discussed earlier, the level of uncertainty is high at pre-crisis stage and
been moderate to low at crisis and post crisis stage respectively. For this
reason, strategies are usually adopted at the time of occurrence of crisis or
after the crisis in Pakistan's context.
In short, crisis management does not exist in Pakistan despite the presence of
several crises. Pakistan needs to adopt a proactive approach and develop an
effective mechanism that would not only ensure sound policies and strategies but
also it will be able to measure performance of policies formed. By this way
policies and actions will be reviewed and altered if those are not in line with
the goals of minimizing crises. And this is the requirement of time in order to
revitalize our beloved homeland.
References
Phil Williams, Crisis Management Confrontation and Diplomacy in the Nuclear
Age, Martin Robertson & Co. Ltd,. London, 1976.
Harvard Business Essential: Crisis Management, Harvard Business Publishing
Corporation, 2004 Zeger Degraeve, Risk: How to make decisions in an uncertain
world, Biztantra innovations in Management, New Delhi, 2006.
Pearson, C. (2002, February). A Blue Print for Crisis Management. Ivey
Business Journal. Retrieved December 17, 2013, t#.UrAaKhHxvIU
Corporate Preparedness, Adaptation and Mitigation. (2013, June 1). In
Corporate Crisis Planning. Retrieved December 17, 2013,
Hawkins, K. (2000). Managing communications in a crisis. Taylor and Francis,
1(1).
Timothy, W., & Coombs, . (1996). Communication and Attributions in a Crisis:
An Experimental Study in Crisis Communication. Taylor and Francis, 8(4).
McKendree, A. G. (2011). Synthesizing and Integrating the Crisis Literature: A
Reflective Practice. Taylor and Francis, 11(3).
Dobrovski, D. (2004, November). Peculiarities of Managing a Company in Crisis.
Taylor and Francis, 15(9-10), 1199-1207
Altmann, N. and Deib, M. (1998). ‘Productivity by systemic rationalization:
good work, bad work, no work?. Economic and Industrial Democracy, 19: 1, 137–160
Appelbaum, E., Bailey, T., Berg, P. and Kalleberg, A. (2000). Manufacturing
Advantage: Why High-Performance Work Systems Pay Off, Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press elery, J. and Doty, D. (1996). ‘Modes of theorizing in
strategic human resource management: tests of universalistic, contingency, and
configurational performance predictions’. Academy of Management Journal, 39: 4,
802–835
Chan, H. (2013, December). Crisis Politics in Authoritarian Regimes: How
Crises Catalyse Changes under the State–Society Interactive Framework. Journal
of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 21(4), 200-210
.